IBM's putting its weight behind an Oracle-backed OpenOffice push rather than follow Google, Red Hat and others on an independent effort.
The latest version of IBM's Symphony collaboration suite, version 3.0.1, will likely be the last based on the computing and services giant's fork of the OpenOffice code base.
IBM is instead …

"Lining up against"

@Lining up against - Not quite so.

As long as OO is under Apache software license, LO crowd can use any improvement or contribution comes with it ( while the other way around is not possible). When IBM will take OO and release a proprietary version of it, they will be under no obligation of contributing back. Actually this is why IBM prefers to use OO instead of LO. The Apache license allows them to benefit from the community contribution without the obligation of giving back which is quite cool isn't it?.

Anyway, as long as OO and LO both adheres to ODF standards we all have nothing to lose.

To what end....

IBM charges $0 for Lotus Symphony (it is basically just Lotus throwing a wrench in the MS Office money machine), so it is not as though IBM is taking open source and turning it into proprietary, fee based software.

numbers

Er, do you seriously consider that because they have the same version number, openoffice 3.4 and libreoffice 3.4 are the same? Hasn't the new firefox schedule taught people how little numbers mean? openoffice might be irrelevant, I don't know, but it certainly isn't a version number that proves it.

Many of Us Lotus Smart Suite Users Still Lament

ALL that money and effort poured into Symphony could have been spent paying off those "unfindable" orginal patent holders, the existence of yet unfindability of whom purportedly makes it unsafe for IBM to just update Smart Suite.

Looks like I'll be consigned to using Lotus Smart Suite as a has-been, lame database app protytype rather than a go-to tool.

Sucks to be in this position.

OO has some nice things in it, but it is just plain old jarring, stressful, and STILL lacks the ability to EASILY do what Lotus Approach can do. Unfortunately, Smart Suite has not seen a worthwhile new update since, what, 2004, of not 1999?